fireball can not only hurt you, but make you look funny as well

[shilsen]

Personally I think the deciding factor shouldn't be whether you save or not, but how much damage you take. After all, you could fail a save vs burning hands and take 1d4 damage, you could make a save against a maximised fireball and take 30... which hurt the most?

And don't forget the target's hit points. The 1st lvl wizard who blew the save vs. the burning hands loses a much higher percentage of his hit points than the 15th lvl barbarian who saves vs. the maximized fireball. The latter probably loses only his eyebrows

 

[drnuncheon]

It became a running joke in my Freeport game that one of the PCs could never grow her hair long because she would invariably get hit with some kind of fire spell and force her to get it cut again.